On Saturday, designer Kate Burton will present her latest collection at New York Fashion Week – with a twist, of course. Barton worked with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM Watsonx on IBM Cloud) that allows guests to identify and virtually try on pieces of the collection.
TechCrunch spoke to Barton and Ganesh Harinath, founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, before the show to learn more about the presentation.
As an example, Burton said technology is integrated into her way of thinking. She likes to play with reality and unreality, and found the idea of using AI-like set design as “an entrance into the world of collections, not AI for AI’s sake,” she said.
“Today, technology is a tool to expand the world of clothes, how they are presented, how people participate in the story, and how they create moments where the eye looks twice,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the collection’s goal was to create curiosity.
Harinath said his company used IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage to make Barton’s presentation a success. This was a production-grade activation using Visual AI lenses (built on IBM watsonx) to detect pieces from Barton’s new collection. It can answer questions in any language through voice and text and offers photorealistic virtual reality try-ons.
“The hardest part was not tuning the model, but orchestrating it,” he told TechCrunch. This isn’t the first time Burton has incorporated technology into fashion. Last season, she collaborated with Fiducia AI to experiment with AI models.
At fashion week, there was some debate about whether brands would use technology and artificial intelligence, and if so, which brands would use it. Burton believes that many brands are primarily leveraging AI in their operations, albeit quietly. “Fewer people may use it publicly because of the potential reputational risk,” she says.
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This has a bit of a rhyme with the early days when many big-name fashion brands were nervous about launching a website. “Then it became inevitable, and eventually the question moved from ‘Should I be online?’ to ‘Does having an online presence make sense?'” she said.
Harinath added that while many brands are experimenting with AI, much of its adoption remains at the surface level (chatbots, content generation, internal productivity tools, etc.).
But Burton sees a world of better prototyping, better visualization, smarter production decisions, and more immersive ways to experience fashion, without replacing humans who “actually create wearable value.” She said change would become clearer if there was “clear discussion, clear licenses, clear credit, and a common understanding that human creativity is not a burdensome overhead.”
“If technology is used to eliminate humans, I’m not interested in that,” she said, adding that viewers are smarter than we think. “They can tell the difference between invention and avoidance.”
Despite the tensions, AI is becoming more commonplace, and shows like Burton’s will one day become part of the norm. Harinas believes AI in fashion will be normalized by 2028 and integrated into the core of retail operations by 2030.
“Most of this technology already exists. The differentiator is getting the right partners and building a team that can responsibly operate it,” he said.
Dee Waddell, global head of consumer, travel and transportation at IBM Consulting, agrees. “When inspiration, product intelligence, and engagement come together in real-time, AI moves from a function to a growth engine that delivers tangible competitive advantage,” Waddell told TechCrunch.
But until then, we have this show.
“The most exciting future for fashion is not automated fashion,” Burton said. “Fashion is about using new tools to elevate craft, deepen storytelling, and bring more people into the experience without flattening the people who make it.”
